family epic

His family epic is a series of episodes confusedly linked.

Balthazar's clan covers most of the Hollywood and heartache chapters in the family epic.

A colorful, closely observed family epic about the immmigrant who created a publishing empire and his son, a playboy turned philanthropist.

Rowland, a fourth-generation Montanan, has written a family epic that has a muted elegance.

The star, Mr. Khan, has a global following, and Indians abroad are a key constituency for these family epics.

Out at the cineplex the action sagas, formula romances and family epics sprawl across the big screen, but terrific little movies often aren't for dating or teen-age boys.

And "A Family Madness" (1986) used the plight of Byelorussia during World War II as a backdrop for a tortured family epic.

Siberiade by Andrei Konchalovsky, the isolated Siberian frontier town, which becomes irrevocably changed thanks to the discovery of oil, bears a resemblance to Western family epics.

The series grew beyond an easy joke about a mob boss with a midlife crisis, and became a family epic about characters who are so fully developed their very thoughts are familiar to us.

Irving's next novel was A Prayer for Owen Meany, another New England family epic about religion set in a New England boarding school and in Toronto, Ontario.

But it should be added at once that "Very Old Bones" is not one of those family epics that begin at the dawn of time and work their way forward a generation at a time.

Jonathan Franzen's family epic, a new collection from Seamus Heaney, Philip Larkin's love letters, a memoir centred on tiny Japanese sculptures ... which books most excited our writers this year?

"In Jarrell's dramatic monologues and Schwartz's family epic, Bishop's tense plainspokenness and Berryman's jagged comedy, the values of Modernism are tested, resisted, and transcended," Mr. Kirsch writes.

Part soap opera, part tragedy and part weird comedy, the Jackson family epic took another turn in a reunion (minus one outcast daughter) before 15,000 people at an arena in the huge MGM Grand Hotel.

Epic Family Epic - 2003 - Dance Theater Workshop, Krannert Center (Urbana, Illinois), VSA North Fourth Arts Center (Albuquerque, New Mexico)

The heroine of Marina Warner's family epic, "The Lost Father" (Simon & Schuster, $18.95), proposes to write a "memoir" about her mother's childhood, and finds herself trying to reconcile fact with fantasy, history with family legend.

The conflict may be direct opposition, as in a gunfight or a robbery, or it may be a more subtle conflict between the desires of two or more characters, as in a romance or a family epic.

She has tackled the large historical theme of political and spiritual exile in this book, using the much abused form of the family epic, and she has produced a work that possesses both the intimacy of a Chekhov story and the hallucinatory magic of a novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Roger Ebert of Chicago Sun-Times gave the film four out of four stars saying "Hugo is unlike any other film Martin Scorsese has ever made, and yet possibly the closest to his heart: a big-budget, family epic in 3-D, and in some ways, a mirror of his own life.

Didion's deft and economical use of this conceit allows her to comment not only upon the novel she chose to write, a romantic tragedy, but also upon the novel she chose not to write, a family epic encompassing generations of Inez's wealthy Hawaiian family, artless emblems of the colonial impulse.